Pre-K a likely legislative topic

San Antonio Express-News

Published
4:31 pm CST, Sunday, January 11, 2015

When Greg Abbott made preschool a cornerstone of his education proposal during his campaign for governor, it signaled to some lawmakers that the upcoming legislative session could put more money in the state’s early education program.

The issue seems poised to take up a share of the conversation in Austin, with several legislators prefiling bills to expand state-funded preschool. Some lawmakers want to make prekindergarten available to all 4-year-olds. Others want to raise the quality of the existing program and provide enough funding to increase it from half-day to full-day.

“It’ll be a huge issue,” said Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, RKilleen. “The governor’s office has made it a priority.”

That doesn’t mean the topic will lack debate, Aycock said, noting there’s not a lot of consensus on how to tweak the state program.

Currently, Texas funds half a day of preschool for 4-year-olds whose first language is not English, whose families have low incomes, whose parents are active-duty military or who are in foster care.

Texas has some of the weakest quality standards for preschool, with no limits on student-to-teacher ratios or class size, W. Steven Barnett, the National Institute for Early Education research director, has said.

A Republican-led Legislature cut approximately $5.4 billion from public education funding in 2011, including $200 million for a pre-K grant program that helped some school districts offer full-day classes. Lawmakers restored part of the funding in 2013, including about $30 million put back into the grant program.

Today, some Texas school districts subsidize the cost of a full-day preschool program with their own funds.

Rep. Justin Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, said that while there’s more bipartisanship support for pre-K this year, Democrats and Republicans will likely split on whether to make it a funding priority.

Asked to predict how the education issue would play out, Rodriguez gave a forecast: “Partly sunny and partly cloudy.”

“I think we’re getting past the point where we have to convince folks of the importance of pre-K,” he said. “But the cloudy part is that even though more and more folks are recognizing and acknowledging the importance of that early investment, it’s still going to be determined by the action of the folks in charge and whether they’ll put money behind their assertions that there is a value.”

Several advocacy groups are lining up to throw their support behind pre-K and bend the ear of lawmakers who may be on the fence about it. The education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas has made preschool its top priority this session.

“We’re talking about the future of the state,” said its CEO, David Anthony, citing research that he said shows high-quality programs can help close the achievement gap by 50 percent for students coming from low-income backgrounds.

He said the group wants the state to require higher pre-K standards in student-to-teacher ratios, class size caps, professional development and curriculum, among other areas.

Anthony’s group is not backing a proposal for universal preschool but rather an expansion of the existing state program, with a funding model that would require school districts to prove that they’re meeting higher standards before receiving more state money for it.

“If you want to have a great educational impact, you have to start at the beginning and that’s pre-K,” he said.

It’s similar to Abbott’s plan. He campaigned on a plan to offer pre-K grants to schools that meet what he called a “gold standard” for quality.

Texas Association of Business CEO Bill Hammond said he hopes lawmakers will coalesce around Abbott’s proposal.

“I don’t think the Legislature is going to fund full-day (pre-K) for all who are eligible,” Hammond said. “For us, it would be tragic for nothing to happen.”

The Greater Houston Partnership, a regional chamber of commerce, is also lobbying legislators to improve the quality of pre-K and expand it to full-day. A broader effort to focus on children from birth to age 3 is also unfolding there, as more groups recognize the value in investing in early childhood education, said GHP President Bob Harvey.

“People in the business community have realized that if we don’t deal with the issues at the front end, at the beginning of the pipeline, we can’t deal with issues at the end of the pipeline,” Harvey said, calling the momentum behind early childhood advocacy in the Houston area unprecedented.

When asked if funding pre-K will divide Democrats and Republicans, Aycock chuckled.

“The governor has made it clear that he’s willing to put some money toward it, so that certainly moves the needle,” he said.